Snow, Tea, Heal

A light dusting of snow this morning, which meant: all the drivers on the way to the Little Prince’s school were bloody insane, Miss B did not get to go on the morning run with me (I am concerned for her paws), Odd Trundles is Extremely Needy (any change is BAD, and means we must stay close to Mum AT ALL TIMES, even when Mum is in the shower), I have a slight but persistent sinus headache (running helped, I guess), and I’m drinking tons upon tons of genmaicha to keep warm.

I acquired the taste for genmaicha before my divorce, and it’s odd how much the taste takes me back. Not in a bad way. It reminds me of the good bits before things fell apart. So it’s nice, but it’s also a creator of small internal shiftings. Relaxing enough to let those things fall where they will is one of the very good things about being an adult, and it’s why I wouldn’t be younger again if you paid me. The further I am from the helplessness of my childhood and the terror of my adolescence, the more I can lay both to rest and let the broken pieces inside me have the space and air they need to bring themselves together in a new pattern.

Sometimes things don’t heal, but you can glue them together in a different way and encourage them to hold.

And so I go onward, now that the dogs are both snoring next to me in the office and I can see squirrels (not Napoleon, thank heavens) running in bare branches outside my window, vanishing into the cedar hedge’s thick green shelter. The sky is that gray infinite you only see when snow comes, but it isn’t the iron of a deep fall. It’s more the haze of tiny stinging snowflakes. Living in Wyoming, as I did for a while, I kept wishing there were different words for “snow”. Then I read Smilla’s Sense of Snow, which remains one of my very favourite books ever, and found out there are. (But not in English. It’s like living in the Pacific Northwest and trying to find words in English for the thousand different types of rain.) I should probably read Smilla again, the prose is so sharp and spare and she is such a well-written female character, it’s almost unreal. After I finish today’s work, maybe I’ll treat myself.

But first, another pot of tea, another small smile at the spaces inside me, full of air and light now, so that the jagged edges in the deep dark can breathe.

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